“To Palestine!” Comments on the Oral History Video Interview with Rachel Dror

Source Description

These two sequencessequence I:
0:35:36–0:36:59 and sequence II: 0:43:49–0:45:44 from an interview
with Rachel Dror
discuss her experiences during and after the pogroms in Hamburg, where she was
part of a group of Jewish youths preparing for life in Palestine, and also her
subsequent return to her parental home in Königsberg [Kaliningrad]. This oral
history interview was recorded on June 20, 2012
as part of the interview project “Sprechen trotz
allem” [“Speaking despite Everything”] run by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe. Survivors from towns in the former German Eastern
provinces—such as Königsberg—or from
German-speaking areas in central Europe with significant Jewish communities such as
Czernowitz,
Lemberg or
Riga were
interviewed for this project. The interview was held at “Ort der Information,” the exhibition space below the Holocaust
Memorial in Berlin. The interviewers were Lennart Bohne, a researcher at the Foundation Memorial for the Murdered
Jews of Europe, and Barbara Kurowska, a freelance research associate for the
interview project. Daniel Hübner, freelance
IT-coordinator for the interview project, was in charge of camera, lighting, and
sound. The interview was conducted in German and runs to a total length of
130:05 minutes. There are two cuts, one due to a short break and a second one
after a scheduled break after about ninety minutes. The interview was
transcribed and edited by Teresa Schäfer, a
freelance research associate for the interview project. The call number for the
interview is 01153/sdje/0048.

Rachel Dror was born
Rahel Zipora Lewin on January 19, 1921 in
Königsberg
[Kaliningrad]. She grew up in a traditional Jewish family—in
addition to a public high school [Lyzeum], she
attended a Jewish religious school. In 1936, two years
after she had dropped out of school and begun to train as a seamstress,
Rachel Dror
decided to join a Zionist
youth movement in order to go to Hamburg for Hakhshara the preparatory
training for life in Palestine. At this point, the social marginalization of Jews
had taken root in German law and was quite advanced. While Rachel Dror had been
confronted with various forms of antisemitism during her time in Königsberg, she
initially experienced a much better situation in Hamburg, a city
considered to be open and cosmopolitan, especially while she was surrounded by
Jewish youths whose shared goal was emigration. She and 27 other youths were
staying at a place at Klosterallee 9. After one and a half years, on the morning of
October 28, 1938, she saw her boyfriend,
Wolfgang Drechsler, for the last time. He
was arrested and deported as part of the so-called “Polenaktion,” during which up to 17,000 Jews of Polish
nationality were expelled from Germany. Many other youths from the Hakhshara group fell victim to this action, so
that their communal home was dissolved and Rachel Dror moved in with
her mother’s sister, Flora Rosenbaum, who was a
teacher at the Talmud-Torah School in
Hamburg’s Grindelviertel. Two weeks later, on the night of
November 9, 1938, government-controlled antisemitism culminated in
the November pogrom.
Rachel Dror was at
her aunt’s house during the night of the pogrom and initially did not learn of
the events. In the first video sequence, she remembers her impressions and
emotions of the following morning, when she witnessed Jews being beaten and
chased through the streets by members of the SA
Storm Division:“When I saw
that, I immediately thought something bad must have happened. So I walked
faster.” She goes on to describe reaching a newsstand in front of
which curious onlookers were crowding. The visual memory of this scene has
stayed with Rachel
Dror permanently:“[...] But he had newspapers piled up
like this (gesticulates), and it looked like blood had been spilled on them
or like they had been painted red. And it was the flames of the burning
synagogues that had been set on fire on the night of November 9-10.” On the
black and white newspaper photographs in front of which onlookers were crowding,
Rachel Dror
notices a red reflection she immediately associates with both flames and blood,
while the newsvendor from whom she used to buy her papers
for a long time addresses her in a Berlin dialect,
insulting her: “Hey, Jew girl, want to see how your synagogues burned, do
you?”

Symbolism in Rachel
Dror’s recollections

Although this sequence describes the events on a specific day, the morning of
November 10, 1938, in a specific
place—Hamburg—it should not be considered an actual account of the
historic events during the November pogrom in this city. It is likely that this section of the
interview reveals a merging of personal memory and subsequently obtained
knowledge about the events. While she was staying at her aunt’s house, Rachel Dror did not
personally witness any of the violence against Jews, their businesses, and their
synagogues. The red reflection—flames and blood—she sees on the newspapers thus
has to be understood as a metaphor seeking to express the destruction and
suffering, the full extent of which she did not learn about until later. Being
reported in the newspapers, the pogrom becomes real to her as she sees testimony written in black
and white. Retrospectively, this moment is meaningful to Rachel Dror since the
unleashing of antisemitism which she had previously witnessed only in an abstract
sense now manifests itself directly in her own environment. It is precisely at
this point that her account switches again from a description of historic events
to a form of very personal recollection: in this moment, Rachel Dror, too, was
marginalized simply because she was Jewish. It was the
newsvendor who, standing in front of her and insulting
her, personified the country’s political culture. The fact that she remembers
that the newsvendor must have been from Berlin due to his
dialect further illustrates the importance of this moment. Rachel Dror immediately
returned to her aunt’s home, where she found out what had happened at the
Talmud-Torah School.
In the meantime, her aunt had learned of the arrest of the teaching staff and
many of her students. Deeply concerned about her own family in Königsberg, Rachel eventually managed to
contact her father, who ordered her to return home at once.

The decision to emigrate

In the second sequence, which builds upon the previous one, Rachel Dror describes her
return to Königsberg. By the time she arrived, her family had been forced
to move out of their family home and into a small apartment. It was there that
Rachel met her
frightened younger brother, who had developed a major speech impediment as a
result of the violence his family was subjected to during the pogrom in Königsberg. On the
night of the pogrom,
intruders had severely injured his father with an oven door
handle.“When I saw that, I thought, I’m leaving. I’m not staying
here! My father said,“Where are you going?”“To Palestine!””

The powerlessness against increasing marginalization, which first expressed
itself in an inability to act, ended the moment Rachel learned of the
physical violence against her father. The fact that even her own family had not
been spared by the violent pogroms triggered an affective reaction. Rachel had prepared for a
life in Palestine in the Hakhshara community, but the group had been
torn apart. Her family did not only lack the financial means to emigrate, but
emigration was out of the question for them for other reasons as well. Her
family—and especially her mother—identified as German. They could neither
comprehend how antisemiticpogroms and increasing
marginalization were possible in the country they considered their home, nor
could they imagine emigrating. The family continued to hope that all would pass.
Not Rachel, however:
not even of age at this point, she intuitively made the decision to take her
fate into her own hands, thus acting against the will of her parents. She
immediately sought to obtain an affidavit for entry into another country. Using
her aunt as a guarantor, she managed to leave Germany on April 29, 1939 and thus saved herself from further
persecution. Throughout the interview, Rachel tries to
contextualize her biography by means of subsequently acquired historical
knowledge, thus attempting to frame it in a narrative. For example, she could
not have known that Palestine—the future state of Israel—was to become
her new home at the time of her emigration. “And if you ask me whether I
identify as Israeli, of course I do! You must not forget that we used to be
dirt and then we became someone. After I had been treated like dirt, okay?!
And then you realize, I am actually not dirt. I am human just like everyone
else.” Both sequences reveal what Baranowski called “the
moment between discomposure and realization,”Daniel Baranowski (ed.), Sprechen trotz allem. Das Videoarchiv der Stiftung
Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, Berlin 2014, pp. 24. in
which personal recollection of one’s own experience, historical knowledge, and
contemporary circumstances of interpretation merge. Only if we take the specific
characteristics of video interviews as sources seriously and analyze them
adequately will it become possible to do justice to the complex narrative of
individual testimony.

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About the Author

Lennart Bohne was research assistant at the Foundation "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe", he was project manager of the video archives.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.